Posted by Gray Herter
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:32:00 GMT
No, it is not a night of progressive Canadian rock music! It's two great ruby talks, one on the rush shell by Nicholas Schlueter and another on cucumber, a BDD framework, by Chris Flipse.
RSVP with the pizza poll (whether you want pizza or not), so we know how much to get and how many are coming.
rush (http://rush.heroku.com/) as defined by the website is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby
syntax. Grep through files,
find and kill processes, copy files - everything you do in the shell,
now in Ruby.
In this talk you will learn 2 things.
First we will go over some rush basics. Like globbing, search and
replace, naming files, and
processes.
Second we will add rush to common tools, such as, Rake, Sake,
Textmate, Capistrano, and Thor.
The Cucumber talk will be: "a bit of a talk about Cucumber, which will be the replacement for the story framework in rspec." by Chris Flipse. Stay tuned for more details as they arrive, or just show up and be surprised.
The meeting will be held Thursday, Oct 16th at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentations will start at 7 PM.
Here is the address:
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building
Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:04:00 GMT
Bring your Ruby Newbie friends to the Sept NovaRUG meeting, where we will hold a Ruby Newbie night to introduce new folks to the Ruby universe.
The meeting will be held Wednesday, Sept 17th at the FGM
headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentations will start at 7 PM.
The meeting will be sponsored by EclipseWorld
, who has graciously offered to let us give out a pass to their upcoming conference (Oct 28-30 at the Hyatt Reston) at our meeting. They also have $200 discounts available to us, just use the code, NOVARUG2 when registering.
The speakers will be a mix of folks who have all offered to provide brief introductions to various Ruby related topics. The speakers include Russ Olsen and Gray Herter of FGM, Keith Bennett of Bennett Business Solutions, and Dave Bock and Arild Shirazi of CodeSherpas (and maybe you, too, if you want to join us with a topic).
The meeting will not be a Ruby class, but rather a brief introduction to several of the main features of the language, along with some demonstrations and testimonials on the usefulness of Ruby. The meeting will be informal with questions and tangents welcomed.
We will start with an introduction to Ruby basics up to the point of creating a class in Ruby given by Russ Olsen. Then Gray Herter will provide an short introduction to container objects in Ruby (arrays and hashes), plus regular expression handling, and ranges. Arild Shirazi will explain Ruby blocks, iterators, procs and lambdas. Dave Bock will demonstrate some dynamic Ruby. And Keith Bennett will wrap it up with an explanation of what he loves about Ruby.
Additional topics are welcomed if you want to propose one. It doesn't have to be strictly about the Ruby language. Any short topic that you think might pique the interest of someone curious about Ruby is fair game. If you want to give a short intro to RSpec or rake, or whatever, just let us know. But remember that each presentation should be limited to what can be covered comfortable in 10 minutes or so (we only have 2 hours!), so think 'lightning talk'. Explaining Rails is out, too big a subject! But maybe showing an example of Rails scaffolding could work (Hey Look, just one command and you get FOUR web pages!). You decide and we will listen.
And don't forget to bring your Ruby Newbie friends.
Here is the address:
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will
let you in to the building
Posted by Gray Herter
Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:48:00 GMT
The August NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, August 27th at the FGM
headquarters from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and soft drinks start at 6:30.
The speaker will be Chris Williams of Iterative Designs.
The meeting is sponsored by EclipseWorld.
An indepth technical discussion about concurrency and why it matters
in modern web and general programming environments. With the upcoming
Ruby 1.9 release and Rails 2.2/3.0 with thread safety, concurrency
should be on the mind of every Ruby programmer. This talk will go into
a discussion of what the different types of threads are, what
precautions or advice you should carry with you as you write
concurrent code, and why you should be looking into other
fundamentally different languages (like erlang or scala) for long
running, complex, and multi faceted requests. Topics will include
Fuzed and why it represents an exciting shift in hosting options and a
telnet chat client, which will be used as a backchannel during the
demonstration. The goal is not to scary you, but to help you see the
forest despite the concurrent trees.
The meeting will be sponsored by EclipseWorld
, who has graciously offered to buy the pizza and provide a free giveaway pass to their fine conference, coming Oct 28-30 to a Reston Hyatt near you! They will have several presentations featuring Ruby, a sure sign of great things to come for our favorite computer language. Check the link out, they have lots of other topics besides a few Rails/Ruby talks, PHP, and lots of Java stuff, for instance (hey, they have to pay the bills).
And we have a Ruby book to give away, too.
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will
let you in to the building
Posted by Tom Copeland
Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:43:00 GMT
The June NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, June 18 at the FGM
headquarters from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will
let you in to the building
The meeting will be sponsored by RosettaStone
, who has graciously offered to buy the pizza (They are hiring Ruby
developers right now, BTW).
Also we will give out a door prize of a pass to the RubyNation.
The speakers will be Chris Bucchere of BDG and Arild Shirazi of FGM.
The first speaker will be Chris Bucchere who will speak on "To Portal or
Not To Portal -- How to Build DRY, Truly Modular Mashups in Rails".
Those with a background in portal software know that portals make it
remarkably easy to mashup data/content and applications from various
sources into on composite web site. But do you really need a potentially
expensive and complicated off-the-shelf portal to do this? Or is it
possible to build a composite application using Rails, partials and the
embed_action plugin? Come hear how a portal-industry veteran and
developer of one of the most widely-used enterprise portals built a
social networking site in Rails using a portal product and then, with a
little reorganization of the Ruby code, removed the portal product
altogether. Did chaos ensue or was the finished product even better
without the portal? More than just a compare-and-contrast look at Rails
inside of a portal environment and out, this talk will dive deep into
the Rails view and layout architecture to show how to aggregate content
in a DRY, no-fuss manner.
The second speaker will be Arild Shirazi who will speak on "CSS for the
Developer". Arild will talk from a developer's perspective about the
black art of CSS. Anyone can waste hours trying to get the web page
looking (almost|just) perfect. Hopefully, I will provide some insight
into creating layout and design in an easy and maintainable way. Along
the way we'll discuss alternatives to the dreaded <table> layout, and
guiding principles to help keep your web content (HTML) separate from
the presentation (CSS).
Posted by Xandy Johnson
Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:55:00 GMT
The November NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, November 28 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.
Patrick Joyce will be speaking on Liquid, a templating language which allows dynamic information to be securely exposed to designers. It was extracted from the e-commerce system Shopify where it is used to safely theme 20,000 different online stores. Liquid is also used as the templating language for the Mephisto blogging system and for the Stikipad hosted wiki service. The talk will discuss when using Liquid makes sense, why it is necessary, and how to incorporate Liquid templates into your application.
Keith Forsythe will be presenting "Anatomy of an Agile Iteration: a RideCharge Case Study." RideCharge is a Rails app. developed using Agile practices including two week iterations, with an
iteration planning meeting, assignments, daily scrums, wiki task
updates, bug tracking, and so on.
Patrick Joyce is the co-founder of SandwichBoard, LLC a startup working to make web based marketing accessible to independent restaurants. He blogs at http://pragmati.st
Keith Forsythe is a founder and Director of Product Development at RideCharge, a service that allows business travelers to book, pay, and expense ground transportation through the web and smart phones.
Posted by Xandy Johnson
Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:40:00 GMT
The October NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, October 17 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30. Pizza will be sponsored by Blue Collar Objects
